04/07/13

Meanwhile...there's something iffy about the second Shuttle XS36V.... When I was researching something else, I had come across something about the Shuttle XS36V and gigabit ethernet, but I couldn't find it again....until I did. Seems there's a known problem with JMC25x controllers with mask revision less than or equal to 4 and the link partner (switch) has 802.3az Energy Efficient Etherlink. The controller will not be able to establish at 1000baseT connection. There's also a problem with cables over 120 meters, but that doesn't apply.

That might be a problem...pretty much all gigabit switches on the market these days are energy efficient and do 802.3az...even if you have to dig deep into the unit to find out. The first Shuttle XS36V is working 1000baseT, because its connected to a port on my gigabit router. But, the router at other end of condo is not gigabit. Though I did pick up a gigabit router to possibly replace it with. Though I start looking around on the Internet to see if there's a gigabit switch that doesn't do 802.3az.....eventually, I find some first gen Trendnet Gigabit switches on eBay. So I bid on an 8 port one...which I win. I have a first gen 5 port model as the switch that zen is connected to, there's a few other things...and I had thought that I would want to upgrade to a bigger switch eventually. Most of my other switches are newer Trendnet Green Gigabit switches (except for a 16 port 10/100 Trendnet switch....because I haven't had the need to replace it, and there isn't much out there of lights on front, jacks on back 16-port gigabit switches.... I actually have one thing that I plan to hook up there someday that is only 10BaseT....a network card for my SmartUPS.....there's a 10/100BaseT card in there now...but looks like it had gotten bricked, and can't get it to take any update.

The work around for the jmc25x is to force it to 100/Full....which is probably more than adequate for my home network and for what its going to be doing...but still it bugs me that its not gig, like everything else. Though in my search, I find reference to fact that there has apparently been a patch a couple years ago to address this problem in the drivers for it....except the vendor doesn't provide a FreeBSD driver.... But, I do track down the Linux patch....wonder if it'll find its way into the FreeBSD driver someday.

Anyways...jumping ahead....I finally went and did the swap yesterday...just before #nchat. Switch to new router and replace the two 5 port Trendnet Green gigabit switches with the one older 8 port Trendnet Gigabit switch. I'll take the forced 100/full out later....but its time for #nchat. But, as the chat is going on, I'm watching irssi connecting and reconnecting, which is making twirssi unhappy as well. Guess the new router is less capable of handling the traffic than old router.

Old router, Buffalo WHR-HP-GN....dd-wrt'd - Atheros AR7240 @ 400 Mhz - 32MB ram & 4MB flash - I don't need the wireless part....haven't really for a long time, but they don't seem to make consumer routers anymore that are router only. I had gotten this hoping it would better keep up with speed demands that my WRT54GS (either v1.1 or v2.0, would have dig through the blog to probably find out which was on dsl and which was on cable)...with its Broadcom BCM4712 @ 200, and 32MB of ram & 8MB flash. Didn't realize that the flash was bigger...though it explains a bit with why I had trouble getting the same functionality out of the dd-wrt builds on it than the sveasoft I had on the WRT54GS. While speed was a problem...for the one on my cable modem.....them eventually become really unreliable was the trigger. To get two WHR-HP-GN's....though the one on cable modem got replaced with TP-Link gigabit router running its original firmware....

Which I will likely leave as is, even though its got pretty decent specs and could be hacked to dd-wrt.... Atheros AR9132 @ 400 Mhz - 32MB ram and 8MB flash. Or the limitations of its factory firmware. In fact thinking that I'll do away with doing dd-wrt and find new routers with better factory firmwares. Though I wonder about find some dual nic minipcs and see how FreeBSD works as a router. What started all this craziness of home servers and networks, was turning an old Pentium 100Mhz computer into a router (dual 10BaseT nics, floppy based OS....)

Oh, the new router I had gotten....it was a WNR3500L v1 - Broadcom BCM4718A @ 480 MHz - 64MB of ram and 8MB of flash....no idea what its factory firmware would do.....The TP-Link is the first router I've had in a while, where it wasn't my intent to immediately flash it with something else, etc.

Anyways....after #nchat, I swap back to the the WHR-HP-GN....and things stabilize again for now. I remove the forced 100Full, and it seems okay with doing gigabit now.

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Now instead of subjecting some poor random forum to a long rambling thought, I will try to consolidate those things into this blog where they can be more easily ignored profess to be collected thoughts from my mind.